It’s been a crazy start to the New Year with a number of excellent businesses coming through the pipeline, soon to be (or already) listed.
We had a lot of feedback from last week’s newsletter about content marketing, so Founder, Thomas, wrote a piece for Entrepreneur which has proven extremely popular and is set to be a top 10 article this week across their whole site.
Over the next couple of weeks, Thomas will be speaking at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas (10am on the 17th) – if you’re going please let us know as Thomas would love to meet you! We’ll also be at NamesCon to expand our team knowledge in the domain space. If you want to learn more about FE International and how we got to over $75M in sales ($60M at time of recording), our CEO, Ismael was featured on the GrowthEverywhere podcast recently, too.
In tech news, replacing humans with AI is now a reality, with IBM’s Watson Explorer being implemented at a Japanese Mutual Life Insurance firm, making 30 employees redundant. The expected pay-back time is just 2 years, so this might soon become a growth/ROI opportunity for US companies, too. Taking charge of your own income could be more important than ever! Read on for this, plus tips on how to establish your focus early on in 2017.
Deal Highlights
New:
SaaS – Business Intelligence – $3.2k net/mo
- 67% trial-to-paid conversion
- Existing high-profile clients
- Outsourced development
- Sold in over 50 countries
- Growing, evergreen niche
Net Profit: $39K
Asking Price: $117K
Sold: $19K
Affiliate – Photography – $800 net/mo
In the News…
Build vs. Buy
If you’re thinking about buying a business, you’ve undoubtedly thought about building one, too. But which is best? Should you build a business instead of buying one? Can you do both? Doug from NicheSiteProject put together an interesting debate with FE mentioned a number of times. We’re firmly in the “buy” camp, but there are definitely merits to both.
Are You Focused?
At FE International, we spend a lot of time making sure we are focusing on the right things. It’s very easy to get distracted, even if you’re a big company. That seems to have happened at Medium, whose CEO wrote a long post about letting 35% of their team go recently. Getting rid of people is never easy in business, so the post is an interesting (and personal reflection) from someone at the top making those decisions.
Can We Replace Thomas With a Robot?
That’s been the debate in the office this week! Continuing the trend from the previous post about laying off staff as they no longer fit the core purpose, what if jobs that are still required can be replaced entirely by robots and machines? The internet has already streamlined a lot of jobs and allowed many people to create profitable businesses with very little overhead, so it will be interesting to see what happens to the world of AI over the next 10 years. The Guardian had an interesting article about an insurance company replacing employees with machines.